We have 3993 guests online

Video Spotlight

Home > Articles > Columns > Changing Times

Changing Times

Kevin Parker's monthly look at the infrastructure of Application Development

With 25 years of industry perspective Kevin has been framing and shaping technology direction both in the US and his native UK. He is currently Vice President, Market Development and Evangelist at Serena Software. He is a sought after speaker and spoke at 50 conferences last year in 11 countries.
Subscribe to this RSS Feed - Get the RSS Feed

- Kevin Parker's Blog >>

- Eclipse ALF Project >>




Agile Lessons From "I Love Lucy"

E-mail
Written by Kevin Parker   
Thursday, 07 June 2007 15:18
i-love-lucyAn old "I Love Lucy" episode shows Lucy and Ethel working at a candy factory. Their job is to take pieces of candy off a conveyer belt and put them in packages. At first everything goes well. Lucy and Ethel have this candy packaging thing down pat. Alas, things start to change. The conveyer belt sends out candy faster and faster. At first Lucy and Ethel try to cope. They try to work faster. Then their work gets sloppy. Finally, rather than packaging the candy at all, they resort to throwing it away, or even eating it. A quick leap of the imagination would show retailers struggling to get the additional candy packages on the shelf, customers refusing to eat more candy just because there happens to be more available, and the factory management struggling to get their supply chain responsive to the faster manufacturing process.  
Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 October 2007 16:00
 

ALM 2.0: Application Development On The Cusp

E-mail
Written by Kevin Parker   
Friday, 08 September 2006 05:18
Why The Industry Is Readying Itself For Radical Change

The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite.

There's a tipping point in our industry: it's happening now and the signs are all around us. The very fundamentals of developing applications are being overhauled, the priorities by which we have set so much store are being turned upside down, the methodologies and technologies we cherish are in flux and the self-evident truths of IT aren't, well, self-evident any more. What is causing this fracture in the plate tectonics of software development? What are the forces that are reshaping the landscape? What pressures are being exerted on the fabric of the industry?

Last Updated on Saturday, 20 October 2007 03:53
 

Putting Humpty Back Together Again: The True Cost Of Integration

E-mail
Written by Kevin Parker   
Tuesday, 01 August 2006 05:08
Every tool we use has its own built in micro-process. Every development methodology we implement has its own macro-process. Our best practices for development are enshrined in the tools we use, the processes we follow and the ways we integrate all these together. When we get this right we can optimize the development effectiveness of our teams; when we get this wrong we risk quality, content and timescales. We all know we could do a better job at integrating but we are prepared to accept the limitations forced upon us and we come to depend on this fragile state of imperfection. When it fails, and it invariably does, what is the true cost of that failure?
Last Updated on Saturday, 20 October 2007 03:55
 

Stretched to the Limit

E-mail
Written by Kevin Parker   
Monday, 10 April 2006 16:00

july-08-stretchbigIf the "World is Flat" how come we still have bumps in the road of collaboration and communication?

When serendipity taps you on the shoulder I've found it best not to ignore the intrusion. I recently got back from an intense trip to India, speaking at several seminars and to a number of our leading customers. On my return I picked up "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman and this book provided me with a deeper perspective on what I had just learned, face-to-face, with the same groups of people I had just met in Hyderabad, Bangalore and Delhi. And here we are in the second edition of Agile Journal talking about Offshore Agile Development.

Last Updated on Thursday, 19 February 2009 15:52
 

Turning the Fragile into the Agile

E-mail
Written by Kevin Parker   
Monday, 06 March 2006 16:00

Tool integrations are notoriously fragile; how can we fix this problem once and for all?

The first sign of trouble is the unusually long time it takes for your IDE to start one morning. Maybe you can't access the trouble tickets any more or the team members cannot build their applications or run the automated test suite.

Last Updated on Saturday, 20 October 2007 08:45
 


Agile Marketplace - Announcements and Special Offers

Webcast:  Moving Build and Code Quality Upstream
This interactive panel discussion moderated by Bob Aiello, Editor-in-Chief fo the CM Journal brings industry experts Anders Wallgren, CTO of Electric Cloud and Gwyn Fisher, CTO of Klocwork together for a candid discussion of the cost savings, productivity and quality benefits that can be achieved by stabilizing builds and code quality as early in the development cycle as possible.
Register Now!

Collabnet -TeamForge 5.3
CollabNet TeamForge 5.3 includes Dynamic Planning—providing flexibility to model release scope and timeline in a single view. Now, you can easily manipulate/adjust release data.
Download Your Free Trial

Requirements-based testing (RBT) can help to ensure comprehensive test coverage, reducing the risk of failure and improving software quality. This white paper details how application lifecycle management can be used to more effectively implement RBT processes, offering greater collaboration, traceability and control.can help you increase efficiency, reduce project risk, and improve overall software quality. Learn how MKS Integrity for application lifecycle management enables RBT, delivering full lifecycle traceability to help ensure that project requirements have complete test planning and execution coverage.
Download the Requirements-Based Testing whitepaper

PureCM –SCM for Agile Teams
PureCM helps you to manage development in short iterations: keeping track of changes, supporting automated builds and preserving frequent snapshots of your projects.
Get the free trial now